Frisco - The Problem is Paradise

Molly Hankwitz draws a situationist map gentrification and urban alienation in San Francisco's resistant bohemia.

It was the Situationists who recorded the great thought that ghettos were an asset to the modern city, and who placed fragments of maps of their favorite haunts in such notable rare texts as MEMOIRES, Guy Debord and Asger Jorn's 1958 collaborative book on Situationist space, which after all was hardly professionally "architectural", rather conceived to describe their concepts of artistic and everyday life. Where they lived, where they worked and played was space, unmapped. They wanted to deliver it as a map with poetry and political sophistication. Their support of ghettos was threefold: a thumbing of the nose to bourgeois dogma on the inner city, it was also aligned with their idea that ghettoes, by virtue of their accumulated masses of disenfranchised, often unemployed peoples were ripe with revolutionary potential, and it was a remark to defend and acknowledge their city home, for none of them lived anywhere but the poorest sections of Paris.

Elbow to elbow with the alienated poor, the blacks and ethnic minorities of the West, Guy Debord and other Situationists positioned themselves in this way. Hardly, did architects, urban planners or theoreticians have to invent the concept of "the alienated man" which Le Corbusier and dozens of architects before and after him have touted as the role-par-excellence of the modern or master architect... visually constructed and widely publicized in the case of Corb around the modular body of a MAN, whose measurements and movements through space could by virtue of their inherent "universality" dictate the appropriate forms and functions for humankind!

For the Situationists, vicious critics of Corb, alienation it would seem, in this form was simply a conceit and a redundancy of bourgeois, thus controlling, thought.

A leap of mind is this interpretation which I add: alienation of poverty was revolutionary for several very specific and situationist reasons...
1) if people already were unemployed, no need to get them to leave their jobs
2) if people were poor they could easily understand the apparatus of exploitation
3) they possessed anger and a need for survival
4) they were by virtue of their poverty class, already organized towards revolutions
5) they were out of the commodity loop of being attached to objects, because they can't afford them.
Such was the state of students and the state of the poor in Situationist times... add to that gender or ethnic difference and you have a proletariat par excellence.

But to such an extent, even Debord and his followers could not get out of a certain idealization of their revolutionary masses. Despite the fact that Debord was notably a prime-mover in the May 68 revolutions, the greatest single threat ever posed to a Western industrialized nation by its populous in modern history and one which, like a shot heard around the world, sparked hundreds of student demonstrations in universities globally, their revolutionary itinerary never reached, for example, a Third World underclass.

We have just passed the thirty-year mark of the historic occasion of May '68. Apparently, it is now treated as an embarrassment in the Parisienne press. It would have gone completely without press here in San Francisco if <MAY 68 in 1998: Activism Then and Now>, my two-night exhibition of Situationist and May '68 films and speakers at Artists' Television Access, had not made it into the select section of The Bay Guardian. (The exhibit included the 1969 unattributed documentary SF STATE ON STRIKE, the West Coast theatrical premiere of Guy Debord's last film, GUY DEBORD: HIS ART ET SON TEMPS with live translation, and a screening of SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE, other films including Amy Harrisons' GUERRILLAS IN OUR MIDST and Sarah Lewison's ABBY HOFFMAN'S DAY and speakers).

While we don't have a ghetto (in the sixties sense of the word) here in the Mission District where such underground avant-garde activity is located but we do have a mixed-ethnic neighborhood complete with ghetto-like projects, mostly black-inhabited, and we do have rising homelessness and gentrification as landlords pump up rents alongside trendy wholesaling of neighborhoods and try to pass such propositions as the recently condemned and voted-down 137, which would have abolished rent control. Those poor oppressed landlords ran an elegant campaign to get Big Government out of their homes--imagine that, out of their homes!

The Mission District, voted one of the three hippest urban areas for artists in the US by the Utne Reader, is a hodge-podge of cultures, small business and low-income tenants now feeling the movement towards gentrification and a bigger-scaled city, one which builds shopping centers, large blocks of middle-income housing "needing" those same shopping centers, and ultra-expensive loft spaces in the post-industrial areas.

This larger scale, literally conglomerates of multiple franchises, in some instances ganged together in mall-type plazas, is emanating from the post-industrial scale and success of an area just south of the Mission called SOMA where artist loft conversions, light industry and new museum building dovetail in a mixed, but economically homogenous and fashionable community.

With the building of Yerba Buena Gardens, the new Museum of Modern Art, the proposed Mexican Museum, Jewish Museum and Children's Place now under construction as well as the SONY Entertainment Center, SOMA is fast becoming an ultra urban art center, pushing "artist residences" a.k.a. expensive lofts and loft remodels deeper into the Mission and pushing low-income Missionites well into Potrero Hill.

Oddly the Latin American family population, renowned, even in commercial representations, as the staple population of the Mission, and evidently an exploitable "family" market for the convenience of suburban-type consumption, is joining the bigger-scale encroachment with a host of new building supportive of increased populations and especially children. Mission Housing's "low-income" buildings, good quality, well-built but larger-scaled housing complexes erected on a family theme, and new schools and daycare to match, have taken over entire blocks in the Mission. Such take-overs address a certain predicted and speculated future, that those blocks surrounding that block will eventually conform -- like dominoes. That these two populations -- wealthy cultured artists and low-to-middle-income Latin American families (never before meshed profoundly in any cultural scenario that I can think of except maybe as the white "served" and "other" servant class) -- is one of the oddly mesmerizing aspects of this new market trend... somehow both groups can be supported in the speculation of new building and somehow both groups can be figured to require the spacious low-density of shopping centers, corporate gymnasiums, Payless and Safeway, neatly located within a car's distance from the balcony or yard! What this plethora of new building presupposes is the sustained use of A) the car (notably a hazard to urban health, hearing, and streets) and B) the suburban paradigm -- car, family, and permanent home -- to sell real estate and support the markets which lend that spectacle an illusion of presence.

In the state of California the term "low-income" legally refers to anyone who makes $19,000 or less. Over half of San Francisco's city population lives on or below the poverty line which is $13,000 or less. Affordable housing, much less art space, is becoming increasingly scarce, especially as usable space is warehoused to increase rents and/or is bought up and out of the affordable market.

Meanwhile, city streets are literally cluttered with scattered sleeping bodies. In my 6 years in the same neighborhood in the Mission, I have witnessed the increase of this problem, only meanly addressed by Frank Jordan's regime with his urban "sweeps" project (MATRIX) now a centerpiece for Willie Brown's mayorship in the "clean-up" of Golden Gate park. Interestingly enough, another measure in the recent election was a proposed mall in Olmstead's historic masterpiece.

While homelessness and houselessness (law prevents one from using one's own car as a house) are on the rise, particularly among African-American men, the problem and its lack of solution hits everyone with a heart. This is not a fashionable Haight-Ashbury liberal kid kind of temporary getaway from normal life, but the harsh reality of, in some cases troubled, in some cases mentally ill, in many cases just down and out and POOR, that there is nowhere for these people to go that is not worse, if not better than the street.

Meanwhile those most compassionate, those who care to deal with the evidence of a society and culture of indifference to their fellow human beings, are being edged out too as new commercial businesses and franchises, intolerant to the presence of severe social decay, move in and clean up.

Frisco, like other American cities, is generating capital from outside corporate interests like SONY -- or those marketing the Presidio Master Plan -- to beautify and commercialize, build Ball Parks, and make more "civic" the dominant city. This is not unlike the Disney Empire's stranglehold on NY's Times Square.

In reality, reality without the glitz of the spectacular commodification surrounding these corporate zones, whose specters of the promise of security and safe-home-entertainment already dictate the form and function of much of our city it will take active resistance, if not brain and heart transplants for all those involved to turn these trends back to the people.

Molly Hankwitz <mollybh@wenet.net> is a writer, editor and architect based in San Francisco.

Also in 2.01:

Sell Me Myself